Blah blah blah. I'm the author of the (sort of) famous "Eric's Ultimate Solitaire." The sample version shipped on a lot of Macintosh computers. Come here to read about what I'm working on and what's goin' on with my family. Also. Things that are funny.

Friday, December 08, 2006

I worked on the BoardGameGeek Gift Guide recently. As I'm always saying... BoardGameGeek.com is like the www.imdb.com of board games. Anyway, the BGG web site is awesome, but daunting for any normal person. They're getting lots of hits from people trying to find good board game gifts for the holidays. So someone smart suggested that us board game geeks should work together to make a gift guide to help those people out.

This was right up my alley. I love board games. And I hate when people have a hard time using things. In this instance I could imagine some kid's mom coming to the BGG site while trying to search for board game advice. And then I could just see her freaking out at the sites crazy complexity and then that kid would end up with another copy of Monopoly.

So I helped out! I really enjoyed working on it. I rallied support from other BGG users for some games that I wanted on the list. I suggested adding price ranges for the games and then looked 'em up up and put 'em in. And I edited the intro paragraphs to be much more concise. The coolest for me was that I learned about Wikis. I had heard about them and I use Wikipedia all the time. I call Wikipedia the new Google. It's the place to go when I want to look up something specific.

Oh, so Wiki's are really cool. I was able to suggest ideas and then implement them right away. On BGG there were no special rules about who could do what. So if you had an idea you could run it by everyone or you could just implement it and see what they thought.
Anyway, here's the board game gift guide. It's got great games on it and almost every one is very approachable, even for non-geeks. :-) I own around half of the games on the list and they're all really good. I hear you saying "But Eric, don't you own like 150 games? Mathematically you'd have to own half these games." Well... yeah. But I swear, these are good games!

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

I started my job at PlayFirst! on Monday. So far it's been awesome. From what I can tell already I have a lot in common with the people in this company. They're a start up in San Francisco that's doing well, and this may seem like a minor thing, but they have free snacks, and drinks, and medicine and Kleenex. I had to bring my own Tylenol and Kleenex to work when I was at Apple...

But this story isn't about that. It's about my walk to the CalTrain station on my way home from San Francisco. I walked out of the office and intended to catch a bus to the train station. After a few blocks I turned down a side street. I passed two policemen who were walking slowly talking to each other. Halfway down the block I saw two women talking and walking towards me. One had white headphones on.

Then I saw a really heavy woman running from behind these ladies. Her, um, heft, was shaking all over. I thought "Where's this lady running in such a hurry? That looks really uncomfortable." She didn't veer around the two talking ladies. Instead she burst right between them, turned quickly and grabbed the one lady's iPod or whatever she was listening to. She kept running, fast. The woman who had just been robbed yelled and then gave chase. ("Gave chase?: Ha, I've never used that phrase in my life.)

At this point everyone nearby stopped. It didn't look like the victim would catch the, uh, robber. But if she did, then what? That's about when someone yelled for help. And on cue the two policemen I had passed earlier ran across the street to intercept the robber lady. One ran behind her and one ran ahead of her. They caught her in less than a minute from when the whole thing started. I decided there were enough witnesses already that I should still try to make my train...

So in the scheme of things it worked out pretty well. I mean, how many times do you see someone robbed and the police catch the perpetrator within a minute. Nice.

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About Me

I'm the author of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire (from long ago). The sample version came with a zillion Macs. I was also the lead programmer on iQuiz for the iPod at Apple. Now I run my own company, Sniderware, and develop and publish games for handheld devices. Some of the iPhone/iPad apps I was the lead on include Beavis & Butt-Head, McAfee Global Threat Intelligence Mobile and Sexy Scratch Off. Also. I have 5 chickens. Check out my solitaire games for iPhone – http://itunes.com/apps/sniderware
I'm married and we have three sons. They're cute, and some are masters of Lego Star Wars for the Wii.